Jim Hatley View Comments 
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Sony make incredible laptops. That’s a fact. As with all Sony products, it looks fabulous, is of excellent build quality, and has absolutely everything you need for life as a freelancing road warrior. It is billed as an “HD and entertainment laptop” on Sony’s web site, and with a 2.8Ghz, 1066Mhz FSB Core 2 Duo processor, it’s certainly no couch potato. This has all the power you need to rule the office by day, while the crystal-clear 18.4”, 1920 x 1080 resolution widescreen ensures that films and games are presented in full glory for the evening wind-down.
This beast of a machine is shipped with 4Gb of RAM, which is essential for keeping the preloaded Windows Vista moving at a good pace. In terms of storage, it sports both a 500Gb magnetic hard drive AND a 128Gb SSD, meaning that you have the double bonus of both swift system speed and high capacity storage for music and HD films. For those of you using high-end graphics applications, you’ll be pleased to hear that it utilises the NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600M GT chipset with a dedicated 512Mb of GDDR3 RAM.
From my experience, this computer handles both top-level 3D and motion graphics applications with ease, which is a rarity amongst laptops. Other than that, it has all the usual high-end computing treats, such as TV tuner, built-in camera, Blu-ray, HDMI output, Wireless-n, and Bluetooth, meaning that there isn’t a device or format on this earth that this beauty cannot interface with… except reel-to-reel tape.
The price? Well, we’re looking at one of the best laptops on Earth at this moment, and that kind of power doesn’t come cheap. If you buy from Sony they’ll charge you £2,500, with the attractive option of paying a little extra to be supplied without all the usual free software that is destined for removal from the word go.
However, you can save a fair few notes by picking one up from dabs.com for just under £2,280, an impressive saving of £220. Yes, either way this is a lot of money, but when other, lesser laptops become obsolete, break or simply lose their sparkle, this will still be standing tall for years to come. I am known to abuse laptops whilst traveling, yet each of my previous VAIO laptops has worked perfectly until it was eventually replaced by a newer model. My last VAIO lasted an unbelievable 5 years of being hauled round the world, until I inevitably dropped it once too often, prompting my latest splurge. When you are getting build quality like that, you can’t afford not to spend the extra.
To put it into perspective, an average workstation-level laptop will cost you at least £1000, but that doesn’t guarantee this level of build quality, and it certainly doesn’t get you the kind of extras that the VAIO carries. I can safely say that this machine will easily last twice as long as cheaper models, and in that time you’ll enjoy both working hard and playing hard on it infinitely more than one of its lesser rivals. Oh, and did I mention that its looks will be the envy of every train, hotel lobby and airport lounge?
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Oct 27, 2008
at 12:26 pm
Sigh. It sounds a dream, but that price tag is obscene. (I’m a poet and don’t I know it!).
I’m liking the idea of more tech reviews like this. Keep ‘em coming!
Oct 27, 2008
at 12:24 pm
Also, to be fair, at 18.4″ isn’t this beast more of a desktop replacement than a portable, on-the-go-bust-out-photoshop-and-start-designing-anywhere laptop?
It’d be great to see a review from the opposite end of the spectrum – i.e. a mini notebook – and how it compares in a freelancing context.
Oct 27, 2008
at 1:51 pm
Thanks for your comments Jon. Expect a review of Netbooks and ultra-portables soon.
Oct 27, 2008
at 2:26 pm
I’d be more than happy to take a look at the new netbooks coming out now – some of these things seem great! Stay tuned…
Oct 30, 2008
at 11:20 am
looks like a serious bit of kit. however with the obscene price point and vista installed, it would take some persuasion not to go for a mac book pro instead
Oct 30, 2008
at 12:40 pm
Good points Alex. However, you are getting your money’s worth in power and features. And yes, Vista isn’t anybody’s OS of choice, but I have to say that if you take a knife to it you can get it running on a par with XP – if you have the RAM to back it up of course!
We are planning on doing a Macbook Pro comparison piece in the near future, so let’s see how the competition fares…
Oct 30, 2008
at 3:43 pm
A Macbook Pro running Mac/Linux/XP AND Vista. Now that’s the solution, best of all possible worlds.
A no knife needed, just a copy of Parallels
(he said, while using both XP and Mac at the same time, on the same screen)
:)
Nov 5, 2008
at 10:09 am
Your blog is very helpful to me. I have got good and useful information about Laptops, notebooks and computers and it can be helpful for other users also.